the drawingboard [dot] me
Business
What the VCIC can teach us about Finding Good Investors.
Finding an investor for your startup is hard, and as I partly covered in my last post: What Tier is your Investor (or what to look for in an investor)? It involves taking a lot of meetings and dealing with a lot of rejections while at the same time ascertaining how much value-add the investor you are [...]
What Tier is your Investor (or what to look for in an investor)?
One question that I often get from founders is what ‘tier’ a prospective investor is. As in, what differentiates their prospective investor over another as ‘better’ or ‘worse’, relatively speaking, and on what basis. Just to clarify, although there is no formal ‘ranking system’ for the tiers of investors, generally speaking, every investor sort of [...]
How do you issue the right number of shares/options to an employee or an advisor?
Most founders have desire to share their equity with people that helped them along the way, both as a thank you, but also as a motivation tool. However, how to share is always a big question mark for every Founder. The two most frequently asked question is, “How much equity should I assign an advisor?”, [...]
Setting Appropriate Milestones in an Early-Stage Startup
When looking to plan for your company’s growth strategy or to go fundraising, it’ll serve you and your company well to break down what you need to do in terms of projected milestones. Technically speaking, I believe a milestone is a future ‘marker’ within your company’s stated growth trajectory. Therefore, milestones, in the context of startups, are [...]
How much money should I raise from an Early-Stage Investor?
Raising money for your startup is never fun. It takes time, distracts you from developing your product, is fraught with emotional ups & downs, and doesn’t have a guaranteed outcome. Frankly, many founders would rather go jump into an icy lake than take another fund raising meeting where they aren’t sure what they should say [...]
How does an early-stage investor review your financial plan?
You are about to go meet an investor… you’ve read on the web and heard differing views from people on whether you need a financial plan… some say you don’t, it’s a waste of time as its all made up numbers anyway… others say, you absolutely need a financial plan… so you walk into an [...]
Additional Notes on Early-Stage Startup Valuation
In my recent post on how an early-stage investor values a startup, I talk about how market comparables were the closest guide to how early-stage investors value a startup vs. any other methodology. However, I feel like I left one question unaddressed. Namely, why are there valuation discrepancies for comparable companies across the world (more [...]
How does an early-stage investor value a startup?
One of the most frequently asked questions at any startup event or investor panel, is “how do investors value a startup?”. The unfortunate answer to the question is: it depends. Startup valuation, as frustrating as this may be for anyone looking for a definitive answer, is, in fact, a relative science, and not an exact [...]
How does an investor evaluate a startup’s team?
A startup’s management team is its lifeblood… no amount of awesome ideas will ever overcome a fundamentally flawed management team. In the early stages of any startup, it is all about the people. But what makes up a good team? How do you know if you have a good team, if you are a good [...]
The Importance of Good Legal Counsel
Going into any new legal agreement is scary. On the one hand, you’ve seen enough movies to know that legal documents can have all sorts of loopholes and/or subtleties that feed your paranoia about walking into a trap at some point in the future, but on the other hand, you know you need to get [...]
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